NBA: Loss of Danny Rumph was tough on Celtics' Courtney Lee

Courtney Lee knows how lucky his Celtics teammates Jeff Green and Chris Wilcox are to be not only playing again in the NBA, but alive after undergoing open heart surgery last year.

Lee’s former roommate and teammate at Western Kentucky wasn’t so fortunate.

On the evening of Mother’s Day in 2005, Danny Rumph died of sudden cardiac arrest after hitting a winning shot in a pickup game in his hometown of Philadelphia. No one at the gym knew how to administer CPR. The last time Lee can remember crying was at Rumph’s funeral.

“It was hard, man,” Lee recalled. “The only other funeral I had been to was my grandfather’s when I was 7. I really wasn’t accustomed to funerals like that. Just seeing him in there, it was definitely tough on me.”

A few months before Rumph died, Lee had set the WKU record for points by a freshman. Rumph had been a junior point guard. Soon after the funeral, Lee and two other WKU teammates had “RIP Danny Rumph” tattooed on their arms.

“I look at it every day I wake up,” Lee said. “When I brush my teeth in the morning, I look at it. It’s part of me, and I embrace it every day.”

Several NBA players play in the Danny Rumph Basketball Classic each summer in Philadelphia to raise awareness and provide screening for hypertrophy cardiomyopathy, otherwise known as an enlarged heart. It’s the leading cause of sudden cardiac arrest. Lee played in the event last August.

So when Lee sees the scars running down the chests of Green and Wilcox from their heart surgeries, he can’t help but think of his former WKU teammate who had no symptoms before his attack. Green underwent surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm. Wilcox had his for an enlarged heart, the same condition that went undetected in Rumph. Lee, 27, has spoken to Green and Wilcox about his friend and their recoveries.

“This is a sensitive subject,” Lee said, “for not only myself, but for them also. Just understanding everything they had to go through and telling them that it was a blessing that they were able to catch it in the timely manner that they did.”

With the Celtics, Lee wears No. 11, Rumph’s jersey number with WKU. He’s playing less, but doing more for the Celtics since Avery Bradley returned from undergoing surgery on both shoulders.

In the eight games that Bradley started, Lee came off the bench and averaged only 17.1 minutes a game, well below the 24.7 minutes he had previously averaged as a part-time starter. In those eight games, however, the 6-foot-5 guard shot 54.5 percent, including 35.7 percent from threeland, and averaged 7.6 points, 1.8 assists and 1.1 steals. Overall, he’s averaging 6.8 points and shooting 47.4 percent, including a career-low 32.3 percent from 3-point range.

Lee sank only 4 of 22 3-point attempts in November while he adjusted to playing with his fourth team in his fifth NBA season, but he has given the Celtics another long-range threat lately.

“There are always those seasons,” Lee said, “that you have a slump or start off slow. One thing you’ve got to do is just keep working. You know your shot, you know your game better than anyone else. So you know if you keep putting the work in, the shot will come around. I knew that.”

Lee shoots the 3 much better from the corners. So do Bradley and Green.

“So we’ve got three guys,” Celtics coach Doc Rivers said with a smile. “The problem is, what if all three are in? There’s only two corners.”

Lee shot a career-high 40.4 percent from threeland as a rookie with Orlando.

“We had Dwight (Howard),” Lee said, “and we had everyone else spreading the perimeter, so that’s where I made my living at.”

Lee has had to adjust to playing all sorts of roles this season.

“We’ve had people out,” he said, “we’ve had people coming back, we’ve had people suspended so it was going to change a little bit. Now it’s more just go out there, run the team, get us in the sets, run the plays, look to score when I have my opportunities and just play defense. It’s pretty much just playing free. What roles do you have? You have a defender, you have a scorer, and you have somebody who’s going to run the team. I’ve kind of got all three of those in one.”

Lee has always been a strong defender, but Bradley’s hustle has inspired him to play even harder. In the fourth quarter Monday, Charlotte forward Hakim Warrick got behind the Celtics defense for what appeared to be an uncontested layup, but Lee sprinted to block his shot.

“It was a big man running down the middle,” Lee said, “and I know that my feet are a lot faster than him, no offense to him. So you don’t want to give up on a play, especially a play you can get back in.”

Lee may not hit every big shot he takes, but he believes he should always try as hard as he can.

“I didn’t have the best childhood,” he said, “but I continued to fight, and I use that same philosophy on the court. I mean, something might not be going right, but you can always give effort. Effort takes no talent.”

Lee grew up in a rough neighborhood in Indianapolis with a single mother and two brothers.

“There were definitely a lot of gang activities,” he said. “I’d be outside playing basketball or football, and you’d hear somebody’s car burning down, and you’d hear gunshots. It was definitely tough.”

Lee said his family avoided the gunfire, but some of his classmates did not.

“I had people that I knew,” he said, “who were just sitting at home, and they caught bullets to the chest and to head without knowing what was going on.”

Lee credited his mother with keeping her children out of trouble.

“We didn’t want for nothing,” he said. “She raised us all well. We all went on to college and graduated, and everybody’s got their own careers. That’s a credit to her for being strong and just staying by us.”

Lee helped Pike High School win the Indiana state championship, then graduated in 2008 from WKU tied as the school’s all-time leading scorer with Jim McDaniels, who played in the NBA in the 1970s. But his defense is what caught the eyes of NBA scouts. When he was a freshman, his WKU coach had him guard the opponent’s highest scorer, and he has accepted that challenge since.

Kevin Garnett, one of the NBA’s greatest all-time defensive players, was asked to grade Lee as a defender.

“A-plus,” Garnett said. “He has effort. That’s the first thing you need for me. When you have to defend, it’s got to be something you want to do. He’s committed to it. He has the energy for it, obviously the athleticism and physical parts to it, and he’s young. Courtney puts a lot of time into it, that’s watching film, understanding different players and it’s something he wants to do.”

Lee’s nickname growing up was Lucky, but no one with the Celtics calls him that because that nickname belongs to the team mascot, Lucky the leprechaun.

“That’s all the Lucky we need,” he said.

Free-throw woes
Poor foul shooting contributed to the Celtics losing the final two games of their season-long, five-game homestand.

The Celtics sank only 6 of 16 free throws in a 90-78 loss to New Orleans Wednesday while the Hornets sank 26 of 31. In a 100-99 overtime loss to Chicago on Friday, the Celtics hit on 20 of 28. That’s 18 missed attempts the last two games.

The Celtics rank ninth in the NBA in free-throw percentage of 77.5, not far off from the 77.8 percent they shot last season, but during the homestand they shot only 67.4 percent, 26th in the league over the last five games. Their opponents actually shot even worse on the homestand, 66.4 percent, to rank dead last in the league.

Late in games, the Celtics would normally want Paul Pierce or Garnett at the line, but they haven’t been as effective as in the past.

Pierce’s free-throw percentage of 79.4 is far below the 85.2 percent he shot last season, and it’s his lowest since he shot 77.2 percent in 2005-06.

Garnett missed three free throws in the fourth quarter Friday, and from the line this season he’s shooting 77.7 percent, a respectable number, but nowhere near the 85.7 percent he shot last year, and it’s his lowest percentage since he shot 77.5 percent a decade ago.

Jason Terry leads the Celtics with a foul shooting percentage of 87.7. Unfortunately, Rajon Rondo failed to inbound the ball to a wide-open Terry in the backcourt in the closing seconds of regulation Friday. Instead, Rondo passed to a double-teamed Pierce, and he was tied up for a jump ball that Joakim Noah won. Kirk Hinrich hit the tying shot with 2 seconds left, and the Bulls went on to win in OT.